Today, everyone is speaking about commons and ‘commoning’, everyone wants to build commons. The World Bank has a group which is supposedly ‘protecting and improving the global commons’ and it reaches out to the private sector to ‘advance common goods’. You can find texts on commons on the website of the European Union, banks organize seminars on the commons. Transnational companies tell us they are building the commons, big magazines declare that Uber is commoning cars, and that the “sharing economy” is a form of commoning.

Interview with Dario Azzellini

Founded in 1973, (yes, that’s 45 years ago!) the Park Slope Food Coop is one of the oldest and largest consumer food coops in the country. It’s a presence in our lives, the source of our food, and a center for community engagement. And it’s also part of a larger coop movement that stretches back in time and exists in many parts of the world.

One Question in On State of Nature Blog

Class struggle, that is, the struggle between labour and capital, is not at all a concept that belongs to the past. In a world of growing inequality, it is a reality more pertinent than ever. A recent study has revealed that since 2008 the wealth of the richest 1% has been growing at an average of 6% a year, while the wealth of the remaining 99% of the world’s population has been growing by only 3%. By 2030, the world’s richest 1% will control nearly two-thirds of the world’s wealth.

interview with Dario Azzellini

“The communes should be the space in which we are going to give birth to socialism.” – these were the words of Hugo Chávez in one of his famous presidential broadcasts. To discuss the Venezuelan communes and the new forms of participation, as well as its successes, difficulties and contradictions, we have interviewed Dario Azzellini*. He has investigated and documented theses issues throughout the Bolivarian Revolution. His book Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela has recently been released in paperback by Haymarket Books.

interview with Dario Azzellini

A common feature in every crisis situation, from the upheavals of the early 20th century to the neo-liberal re-structurings of the late 20th century, is the emergence of workers’ control – workers organising to take over their workplaces in order to defend their jobs and their communities.

The term democracy is generally used as a synonym for liberal democracy, which is far from being the only possible form of democracy; indeed, it is even questionable whether liberal democracy was ever intended to be truly democratic. For centuries, liberals and democrats have been fierce opponents. Liberals only accepted democracy when it was limited to the political sphere, excluding it from the economic and social sphere. Liberal democracy became the new form of governance of the emerging production model (industrial capitalism).

No doubt we are heading for another economic crash because capitalism is always heading for another economic crash. It is the nature of capitalism to increase surplus capital and then destroy it again through a crash or war, in order to restart the accumulation process once again. After every crisis, as historical data shows, the rich get richer and capital concentration grows. The cycles from crash to crash are becoming shorter as the accumulation of surplus capital becomes faster.